Hacker News: mattbillenstein

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a pardon from Trump"

mattbillenstein — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:25:04 +0000

Yeah, but he has a lot more money now - grifted literally billions - so I guess more is more, so idk.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a pardon from Trump"

mattbillenstein — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:04:41 +0000

It's probably as much about PR as it is about money - Puffy is a heavy lift on the PR side...

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Ask HN: How do you track FIRE progress?"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:24:44 +0000

Spreadsheet + GOOGLEFINANCE("AAPL")

New comment by mattbillenstein in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:03:22 +0000

I tried using refurb'd Thinkpads as my travel machine for a long time - they're very brittle hard to fix laptops - kinda like Macbooks.

The Framework on the other hand is so easy to work on and get parts for - I know this isn't probably a main selling point for most users, but if you need this, Framework is like the only game in town.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Image-blaster: Creates 3D environments, SFX, and meshes from a single image"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:44:08 +0000

My team is working in the character animation space which might complement this: https://uthana.com/

Example: https://uthana.com/app/preview/cXi2eAP19XwQ/mH7opbcqZE4P

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Elon Musk's Grok Is Losing Ground in AI Race"

mattbillenstein — Tue, 12 May 2026 03:28:55 +0000

The fuhrer will be disappointed.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left"

mattbillenstein — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:12:45 +0000

I tend to use a few services on each cloud as possible so it's easy to switch between them; spinning up an Ubuntu VM that's identical on nearly every cloud is a superpower.

And, so if you keep it simple like this, it's not too complex and the costs are knowable - mostly VM hours and S3 for most of what I run.

But, the thing I've become increasingly disappointed with is simply the performance. The cpus are _slow_ - being forced to use EBS for a lot of things is _slow_ as hell; and starting/hydrating new VM volumes is super duper slow (have fun paying for fast launch).

So, for what you pay vs what you get, it's a huge difference, albeit very convenient.

Increasingly, I think about like racking stuff - like run most of your workload on dedicated hardware somewhere close to an AWS region and then burst into the cloud as needed and just use s3 in that region. Reduced cost, better performance for what matters, and you just pay for hands-on in the datacenter. Send them servers and just manage it all remotely.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

mattbillenstein — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:23:21 +0000

Crypto was always sorta a casino - and there are just better casinos today - sports betting, prediction markets, etc.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "PyInfra 3.8.0"

mattbillenstein — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:33:41 +0000

I should try this myself, but I also rolled my own https://github.com/mattbillenstein/salty

In the spirit of Saltstack with full python throughout including Mako templating. It has a very simple set of operators mostly around idempotent file management and shell commands to do things like restart services.

This enables very fast deploys - small changes on a small number of machines in < 10 seconds.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "EFF is leaving X"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:02:31 +0000

Pretty interesting to see the drop off in impressions - Twitter/X really is just a megaphone for Musk to deliver his "probably next year" wrt various product releases for the Elon-gelicals who bid up Tesla stock to meme levels.

I really can't imagine the data is even good for training Grok anymore - like if it's such a small subset of neo-nazi supporting folks - how is it even useful?

New comment by mattbillenstein in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

mattbillenstein — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:04:45 +0000

Framework Laptop + some form of Linux - MacOS keeps getting worse and the hardware exceeding hard and expensive to repair.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Time to Dump Windows?"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:41:01 +0000

If I could play GTA6 on Ubuntu at release, I'd probably switch, but as-is, I'll probably stay on Windows 10 indefinitely for gaming.

I've used Kubuntu as a daily driver at work several times - imo it's superior to a mac for development; Apple is so actively hostile to actually running open-source or custom software.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

mattbillenstein — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:43:42 +0000

I don't have it at hand, but if you look at all the products and apis they cut - and then all the users who abandoned it in the first few months, I think that's how this was derived.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:43:18 +0000

He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:40:53 +0000

This is becoming the problem with all of his businesses - Tesla has a crazy valuation and it really seems like they're having huge trouble getting Robotaxi going in Austin given the very slow progress there.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Crypto investor turns $50M into $36,000 in one botched move"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:48:48 +0000

Worked in this space briefly - the footguns in defi are crazy - nobody should use or trust any of this stuff ever.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

mattbillenstein — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:30:18 +0000

Extends to the extreme levels of SaaS-ification of fairly basic app functionality as well.

It's often simpler to build something you know than to integrate a 3rd party service, but it's highly frowned upon by a lot of devs and management.

Auth and analytics are things I'm thinking of - we have good tools to build these in-house. Also just running a database - never seen so many people afraid of installing postgres and a cronjob to back it up.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Layoffs at Block"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:08:25 +0000

Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway. I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Hetzner: Statement on price adjustment as of April first 2026"

mattbillenstein — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:49:33 +0000

Wow, these are large increases - 38%.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 01:02:17 +0000

Maybe, but you're paying through the nose continually for something you could learn to do once - or someone on your team could easily learn with a little time and practice. Like, if this is a tradeoff you want to make, it's fine, but at some point learning that 10% more can halve your hosting costs so it's well worth it.